Can't Fix a Spiritual Crisis With Federal Program

This is a textbook illustration of the spiritual and moral
crisis – the loss of core values – that has slowly poisoned American culture
over the decades. Marriages take work. Restless spirits have to be tempered
with self-control. To declare these obvious truths isn’t cruel. Indeed, to
relieve people of responsibility for their actions is to treat them like
children. It’s the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”

I remember a little over a decade ago (has it been that long?)
when my wife and I finally started going to church. The pastors just then were making a lot of announcements about an upcoming “Mission to Maine” the church was
undertaking. Witty fellow that I felt
myself to be, I asked one of the pastors “Lot of heathen up in Maine?”

And he started to explain to me how family structures
had fallen apart in rural Maine. Unwed
mothers. Drugs. Alcohol.
People on welfare, or trying to get onto disability. And it occurred to me, there was a lot of that going on around us in rural Pennsylvania, too.

This has been going on a while. It is everywhere. And it is a spiritual crisis.